The subject matter disclosed herein relates generally to ultrasound systems, and more particularly to methods and systems for communicating data within an ultrasound system, particularly transferring data from a front end of the ultrasound system to a back end for processing.
Diagnostic medical imaging systems typically include a scan portion and a control portion having a display. For example, ultrasound imaging systems usually include ultrasound scanning devices, such as ultrasound probes having transducers that are connected to an ultrasound system to control the acquisition of ultrasound data by performing various ultrasound scans (e.g., imaging a volume or body). The ultrasound systems are controllable to operate in different modes of operation and to perform different scans. The signals received at the front end of the ultrasound system are then communicated to and processed at a back end.
In conventional ultrasound systems, the front end generally includes an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that beamforms the received signals. However, this hardware implemented beamformer provide less flexibility. For example, the type of beamforming that is implemented is limited to the particular hardware implementation, such that only a specific beamforming is capable of being performed. Thus, the hardware components in the front end are specialized and do not allow changes to the beamforming algorithm once the algorithm is installed within the ASIC or FPGA.
Moreover, multiple beams may be created at the same time, for example, during four-dimensional (4D) imaging. In hardware implemented beamformers, the creation of these multiple beams at the same time requires intensive or significant processing, which can result in a costly implementation and an increase in the size of the ultrasound system.
In software implemented beamformers, the beamformer is implemented in the back end of the ultrasound system. In these software implemented beamformers, all of the channels of beamformed data created from the received signals must be communicated from the front end to the back end for backend processing. The amount of data that needs to be communicated from the front end to the back end in these software implemented beamformers is large and can increase significantly depending on the type of scanning being performed. Accordingly, higher bandwidth buses, more communication lines and/or higher processing power are required to operate these ultrasound systems. These components can also add size and cost to the ultrasound system. Moreover, the data rates needed to transfer the amount of data to be processed may exceed the highest data transfer rate of the communication lines (e.g., a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus) of the system.